


captain anachronism

by gossamernotes



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, PTSD, brief usage of homophobic slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 15:22:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1987935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gossamernotes/pseuds/gossamernotes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is reading while Bucky watches TV across the room and comes across a word he doesn't know. Tapping on it, he looks up the meaning.</p><p> </p><p>  <em><strong>Anachronism:</strong> noun: a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned.</em></p><p> </p><p>The laughter that bursts from his lips at the definition surprises him almost as much as it does Bucky.</p><p>[The story wherein Steve deals with a life out of place in the 21st century after seeing how the world has changed. It's more overwhelming than he ever expected.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	captain anachronism

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, so this is a bit different from what I have been doing. I have just had this idea for a while and wanted to write a story that focused around this word, so this came out in the last hour or so.
> 
> Let me know if you like it. I kind of want to continue this, so let me know what you think.

Steve can still remember the taste of his mother’s favorite pie. 

Huddled in poverty between paper-thin apartments, Sarah Rogers worked from dawn to dusk to scrape money into her empty pocketbook. It filtered into checks sent to her landlord, cursive script belaying her tense fingers as she paid the rent, and to the pharmacist down the block who had taken a shining to Steve.

Steve can still remember the way she smiled at him and ruffled his hair when he asked what he could do to help her. She had just laughed. 

“Just try and stay out of trouble.”

He did his best. Really, he tried. But there was a fire in his belly that raged at the kind of injustices that Brooklyn was bred on, so he often came home with busted knuckles and split lips that left his mom furrowed with concern. 

It was after he picked a fight with Arnold Jenkins and his gang that Steve recalls stumbling back to his apartment, no older than eight, to find his mother hunched over their cramped kitchen counter. As if she already knew, she had told him to clean up without even a glance over her shoulder. He went quietly, wincing as he washed the scrapes flaring against his pronounced jaw, and returned to find his mother sitting at their kitchen table. 

There were three plates on the table, each with a slice of banana cream pie placed on top. 

Steve had sat down, unsure whether he was more excited for the treat or for Bucky to be coming over soon. His mother sat across from them and bowed her head in an Irish prayer that Steve never had understood. He ate quickly, garnering more than one disapproving look from his mother’s keen eye, but savored each bite of honey-drizzled banana as it slid over his lips. 

And even before tasting, Steve had known that his mother never skimped out on her hand-pressed pie crusts. It had been as delicious as it had looked. 

Even today, Steve can remember the taste of that pie against his tongue. The cool, creamy texture that only his mother had ever managed to get right. She had done so with pennies to her name, saving up for the right seasons where bananas were at their ripest.

Now Steve only has to leave his apartment and walk a block to the nearest grocery store to find any food he wants. Strawberries, apples, grapes, bananas; Steve can buy them whenever he likes come rain, snow, or shine. His fingers always twitch forward when he looks the fruits over, eyes narrowing on their prices and fighting against the reality of inflation, but he never puts them in his cart. 

It’s only one day after debriefing with SHIELD that Steve takes a new route home and stops by a local bakery crammed into an aging building. There is a chalkboard outside with their menu drawn carefully in colorful chalk, but it is their special of the day that leads him inside. 

He orders a slice of banana cream pie from a young girl behind the counter whose eyes light up when he walks in. Steve ignores the attention, walking around the bakery with pointed steps and wandering eyes, until his order is ready. Walking back to his apartment, Steve wraps his fingers tightly around the plastic bag holding his dessert and hurries his steps.

It is nearly midnight when he finally opens the container and dips a fork into the slice of gooey pie. From looking, Steve can see the banana-filling is covered in tufts of fluffy whipped cream and syrupy caramel drizzle rather than the honey his mom preferred. The crust is denser than the flakier variety his mother had perfected, and it sticks to his fork as he picks a piece from the slice. 

Steve takes a bite.

It doesn’t taste the same, and with closed eyes, he chews on the disappointment. 

_______

Between waking up seventy years in the future and fighting a deluded norse god on the streets of Manhattan, Steve had taken very few missions missions.

Fury had never called him in, and Steve had never pushed. For all he cared, he could spend the rest of his life shuttling between his apartment and the old-fashioned gym SHIELD had directed him to. Life was simple that way -- boring, even -- but it was a penance. 

It felt like _something_ Steve deserved after the war. 

Sitting under the careful eye of Nick Fury in an office at the top of SHIELD’s headquarters in Washington D.C., Steve wonders if he is ready for _more_ than what his old life demanded of him. 

Fighting is all that Steve has ever known, whether he was good at it or not. He never knew when to quit, and for some people, that was enough to make him useful. Groomed into a super soldier, Steve had met expectations in the future of his obedience. His unquestionable faith in the armed forces that would make him walk freely onto foreign soil and open fire. 

They could not have been more wrong. 

War now is different from what Steve remembers. Trenches and front lines are old news in the rhetoric of battle. Insurgency has taken their place with automated drone strikes and weapons of mass destruction that makes Steve’s blood run hot. 

His country traded in Uncle Sam for Director Fury. A fight for freedom to a fight for security. And it makes Steve wonder if his generation’s sacrifice of life and limb and morality had meant anything at all. 

Shifting in his seat, not under the scrutiny of Fury but rather his own thoughts, Steve lets his arm dangle from the chair. His fingers brush against the cold vibranium of shield, and he can feel the groves of the plating underneath them. The paint had been chipped from a few Chitauri blasts, but Tony offered to do a repair. 

Steve accepted gracefully and watched over Tony’s shoulders as he set to work on his most prized possession. And when the wet red paint on the outer rim looked liked blood before it dried, Steve said nothing of it. 

Ticking a finger against the metal, Steve ignores Fury’s look as he stands, strapping his shield against his forearm before he turns to leave. 

“I’m in.”

After all these years, fighting is what he was made for. Steve has a responsibility to protect what he loves. He will head into war again -- a different kind -- and dodge singing bullets with coordinated attacks. If he tries hard enough, focusing only on his beating pulse as he make his way through battle, Steve thinks he might be able and pretend that nothing has really change. 

He wonders if thinking like that will get him killed one day. 

_______

Steve can count the number of times he has ever danced. 

There were one or two slow waltzes with his mother in their living room when their neighbor’s radio was just loud enough for them to hear the music through the walls. Bucky had gotten him into a dance hall once before Steve realized it wasn’t his scene, but that hadn’t kept his best friend from teaching him a few moves despite Steve’s awkward steps and clumsy feet.

Steve, standing by the corner of the bar at a nightclub, watches the crowd in front of him twist to the music pounding through his skull. The speakers are heavy with bass, thudding into his body as the music blares, and Steve is lucky to even hear his own thoughts. 

There are no voices of smooth malt echoing through the room while girls in hooped-skirts glide across the floor. The boy’s no longer hold their dates at their elbows, spinning them in closer for dips and twirls. There are no quick-steps or balled hops when the music swings into ragtime. 

It is not at all like what Steve knew growing up. 

Instead, there are only grinding bodies as people try to wrap themselves into one another. Hips twists from side-to-side against the hard bodies behind him, and Steve feels hot when he sees a couple on the floor slip their hands into each others’ waistbands. He looks away, eyes flicking from couple to couple as sweat and booze mingled against their exposed skin, and it makes Steve grab for his drink that'a been sitting untouched on the bar counter. 

It will do nothing, he knows, but blending in for this stakeout was important. He brings the glass to his lips and takes a sip, feeling the sharp burn against his throat for only a moment before it fizzles away. Steve looks at the clear moonshine and wants to laugh. 

He remembers the first time he drank all those years ago in an apartment he shared with Bucky after their parents had all died. It was Bucky’s day off of work, and he had brought home of bottle of uncut moonshine that had burnt when he took a sniff from his glass. Steve had ignored the worried twinge in his friend’s mouth when he took his first sip and choked the burning liquid from his throat. 

Steve doesn’t remember much after that, but from what Bucky had told him, it had been a wild night.

Stirring the drink in his glass, Steve takes another sip and thinks that Bucky would be upset with the low alcohol content now. Even if he could still get drunk, Steve isn’t even sure if this would do the trick. 

He also wonders what Bucky would say about Steve’s outfit as he’s clad in tight denim that hugs his thighs and a loose cardigan buttons at his waist. Steve’s hand moves to worry at his gelled and tousled hair, wanting to put it back into its usual part, but he refrains. As stupid as he feels, standing in the corner of an all-out rave with strangers’ eyes roving over his taut muscles as if he were candy, Steve forces himself back to his mission of reconnaissance. 

Natasha would have words with him if he missed this contact agent. 

Fury would say nothing.

And Bucky? 

It doesn't matter because Bucky is dead, moonshine goes down a little more than water, and Steve just wants to go home. 

_______

Growing up in a queer part of Brooklyn had been a curse for Steve.

As small and skinny as he was, Steve had found himself cornered more than once by jeering dock workers with clenched fists aiming at his chest. 

_Fairy_.

 _Faggot_.

They were things that Steve got more than once, and they were things that Bucky fought against for him with the grit of his teeth and blood. Their friend, Archie, hadn’t been so lucky to escape fights like this and had ended up dead in an alley after he’d been followed leaving a drag hall one night. 

No one seemed to have noticed beside Steve. Not even Archie’s own family. 

Steve sees couples now when he takes his rare walks through Central Park. There are women pushing strollers over hot pavement, fussing with bottles while their husbands keep beside them. As he walks to the playground, there are men there holding hands, resting their heads on each others’ shoulders as they surely think about having kids of their own one day. 

There is no end to the kisses he turns from on the street for privacy’s sake. A never-ending supply of intertwined fingers and blushing cheeks that make Steve blank at the display. 

It is a change for the better, Steve thinks, even if he's not quite used to it yet. 

He does bit by bit. It comes with reading and watching movies over the past several decades. Ease comes as he lives his life, watching couples on the street pass him by that would have been beaten years ago for living so openly like they do now. Change takes roots when he sees marriage equality and civil rights rallied for in front of his own eyes. 

It makes him think of Peggy who exuded her femininity with such sharp precision that it doubled as a weapon. Her red lips and coifed hair brought men to their knees for more than one reason, and Steve had learnt how powerful Peggy’s seductive weapon had been when she found him that night in her sculpted red dress. 

Times have changed, and with it, sexuality has become so flagrant -- so commonplace -- that Steve finds himself reeling. From breathy moans and slicked skin on TV to sexual equality and rallies across the country, Steve lives in a time where everyone else seems to know who or what they like except for him. 

The honesty is refreshing. Steve thinks that maybe such openness will help him one day find the right partner for him.

For now, he is okay to sit on a park bench alone and watch the world spin on empty-handed. 

_______

After his father died, Steve’s mother had started working as a nurse across town to keep a roof over their heads. She would tell him stories of lame children, braced at their ankles and knees, who suffered bone-deep aches with polio. He would hear her talk to their neighbors about keeping cleaning when the newest tuberculoses wave would sweep the state like a ravished plague. Steve remembers her bringing him asthma cigarettes in the winter that made his chest tighten, and even on the worst days, she would never take an aspirin herself as just one pill would cost her a whole day’s wages. 

It is a miracle that his sickly self had survived to become Captain America -- the world’s first superhero with a hearty pulse and enough strength to bench-press a car filled with USO showgirls. It had all come at a price though, one that Steve had reconciled himself with years ago. 

It’s the price that kept him alive long enough to see everyone else he loved die. He thinks, maybe, that he wasn’t as ready for such a price. 

Remembering those days when the winters were cold, his lungs were weak, and Bucky prayed feverishly over his bedside, Steve now finds himself visiting pediatric hospitals across the state when he really tells JARVIS that he’s going for a run. No one follows him -- not with his baseball cap tucked low and a leather jacket wrapped around his shoulders -- but the kids always recognize him once he steps into the hospital. 

It’s always the kids who notice him first. Steve has never figured out why. 

Months have passed since the fiasco in D.C., and while he’s not been admitted himself as of late, Steve feels uncomfortable as he treads the white hallways of the hospital towards the ward’s playroom. It’s been too long since he has last visited these kids -- long enough that a couple died while he and Sam were off country-hopping to find Bucky -- and he digs his heels into the ground with each step he takes. 

SHIELD is gone. Hydra is regrouping. Natasha is still out creating covers, but at least picks up a phone from time to time to give Steve advice. And Bucky is now held deep in the Avengers’ Tower, quarantined from all save a handful of vetted doctors and psychologists, and having decades worth of programming undone. 

Steve’s hand clenches. 

He’s not totally sure that whoever he sees down there again once he’s got clearance will be Bucky, and that makes his chest hurt. 

Reaching the playroom, a smile manages to flit against Steve’s lips as children rush him, climbing at his legs and reaching up for him with outstretched fingers. He crouches down and talks to them all, rubbing his hands through their hair or fist-bumping them with practiced eased. One girl tangles her fingers in his stubbly beard, and Steve has to smile at that. 

It’s a day spent coloring with crayons and laughing with boys who foolishly want to become Captain America’s sidekick. 

It is nearing dinner and almost time for Steve to say goodbye and look past the glassy, teary eyes that spring at his leave. Standing up, Steve stretches his cooped shoulders to see a boy facing towards the wall at a table across the room. He’s never seen this kid before, so he heads over with quiet steps. 

Steve stops when a voice calls out to him, and he turns to see a nurse waving at him. He pads over and waits for her to speak. 

She gestures towards the kid at the table. “He’s new, Steve, so be careful. He doesn’t like to be touched when he’s working.”

He frowns. “Working on what?”

“He’s been learning to spell his name again. He was in a car crash, the poor kid. He’s had to relearn to do almost everything, so be patient, alright? If he doesn’t talk to you, don’t be surprised. He has always been a quiet guy.”

Steve nods and heads back to the table, peering over the kid to see a hand scribbling furiously at a slanted piece of paper. The boy doesn’t even shift when Steve sits down.

Clearing his throat, Steve opens his mouth. “Hey, I don’t believe we’ve met. What’s your name?”

There is no response. 

Steve waits, wondering if the kid has even heard him, and watches him move his crayon over against the paper. No real letters come to shape, and Steve notices the way that the boy’s hand trembles after each failed attempt. He lifts a hand to rest on the kid’s shoulder but stops when he remembers that he’s not one to be touched so easily. 

So he keeps to himself -- both his hands and his words -- and watches the kid write until it really is time for him to go. Steve stands and makes his goodbyes to the other children, fielding hugs left and right, before he starts walking down the hallway. 

“Wait! _Stop him!_ ”

Steve jerks back at the frantic voice to see the boy from earlier running at him full tilt. There is no limp in his gait as he skids to a stop in front of Steve, chest heaving from the sprint. He looks up at Steve with wide, green eyes and hold out the piece of paper he'd been working on earlier to Steve. 

Frozen, Steve eyes the prosthetic arm that the kid had kept hidden in his jacket during their time together earlier. It is plastic and rudimentary at best -- no doubt a temporary fix for the problem -- and it makes Steve’s eyes sting. Reaching for the paper, Steve takes it and looks over the sheet before bending to his knees and opening his arms for a hug. 

The boy walks into the embrace, tucking his shaved head into the crook of Steve’s neck. 

James. The boy’s name is James. 

And that gives Steve hope. 

_______

Flying cars had once seemed impossible to Steve, but nowadays even flying men and norse gods and floating fortresses lined with guns hardly make him blink twice. 

This is a _crazy_ life he lives, Steve thinks. It really is. 

Now living in the Avengers’ Tower in his own flat that he shares with Bucky, Steve is surrounded by the height of technology -- and occasionally -- it is enough to make him flush with embarrassment when he can’t quite get something to turn on right. 

Bucky, to Tony’s infinite pleasure and Steve’s expectations, takes to technology like a plug to a socket. He soaks up technobabble like he’s fluent in it which he really might be. It was a tough curve on the uptake to beat, but between two acclaimed scientists and a couple of super assassins, Bucky now finds himself engrossed in circuitry and wires as if more than just his arm was made of them. 

Steve remembers that Bucky had always had this gift. Whether it was tinkering with cars at local garages or staring wide-eyed around the Stark Expo, Bucky had always loved technology with a fervor that escaped Steve entirely. 

But it’s not like Steve hates technology. Not even close. In fact, he’s quite recently become a fan of e-readers much to Bucky’s surprising outrage. 

They had never had the money for books growing up, but when they were lucky, then could scrounge around for enough nickels to buy campy detective leaflets and old comic books from vendors down on main-street to keep occupied. There is something about thumbing through the pages that keeps Bucky a purist, so he and Steve occasionally head out to second-hand shops and pick up old comic books that Bucky thinks would be good. If he is desperate enough for a particular read, Bucky will head online -- armed with a SI-issued credit card -- and buy whatever collectors’ comics he wants. 

There are even a few out-of-print Captain America comics put high on his shelf, but Bucky hasn't read them. 

Steve never comments on that. 

Curled into the couch, Steve finds himself reading a new history book from Pepper’s recommended list while Bucky sits in front of the TV with a bowl of pretzels in his lap. The room is quiet save for the chattering sport reporters that take digs at the Dodger’s ranking, which makes Steve smile, until a word on his e-reader makes him stop. 

He taps the word and brings up the meaning before doubling over in laughter. 

_**Anachronism:** noun: a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned_. 

This, Steve thinks, is a word that truly fits his definition of life. Dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, if he could look at himself right now, Steve knows that the time in which he belongs in is not the one he has wound up in now. 

He just makes do with what he’s got. 

Bucky is now facing away from the TV, looking over his shoulder towards Steve with raised eyebrows. “What’s so funny?”

Steve shakes his head before flicking to the next page of his book. 

He doesn't answer. 

_______

Steve will admit that maybe he was a bit harsh when he called Tony’s tower ugly. 

Maybe. And _only_ if he is feeling generous. 

The New York skyline is something that Steve never got to see much growing up, except for the few times that Bucky and he would head into the city and pay two quarters to climb a building. The stairs had tugged at Steve’s lungs too hard to make the trip often, but Steve always found that it was the sight of the skyline stretched out before him that really took his breath away.

The skyline is different now. As he sits on the balcony of the tower, shivering under the breeze, Steve sketches idly with a pen tucked into his hand. He looks at it after a few minutes and stops once he realizes that the skyline in front of him and the one on his paper do not match. 

Rather than lit skyscrapers with neon signs, there are brick-and-mortar giants rising from the dusty streets of old New York. Billboards have replaced the bright flashing lights of Times Square, and there are fewer cars littering the crowded streets of the city. 

It is a familiar sight that makes Steve rub his thumb over the sketch. It is a light touch that keeps the picturing from smearing, but as he hovers over the picture, Steve is almost afraid to touch it. He fears it might disappear at the slightest bump from the future. 

That is how Bucky finds him an hour later, hunched in his seat with his sketchbook forgotten in his lap. Steve is just staring at the skyline now, and Bucky joins in by taking a seat next to him. 

He looks down at the picture in Steve’s laps and whistles low. “Seems you got a good memory, Steve,” he says. Steve shrugs. 

“It’s home."

They sit quietly for awhile until Bucky begins talking, rambling about a mission he’d gotten back from with Clint and about how annoying it was to be stuck in the same room with Tony for more than an hour. It’s a light conversation that Steve would have killed for months ago, and while he hates to think he’s getting used to the miracle that is Bucky’s recovery, Steve can’t bring himself to hear much beyond the noise of the city below him. 

It’s been a few years now since Steve was brought up to speed about the future and what all it would throw at him. 

It’s been even less since Sam had asked Steve what really made him happy, and he hadn’t known how to answer at the time. 

He would wake up occasionally -- after Hydra and Pierce and the Winter Solider -- and stare into his bathroom mirror with eyes that looked beyond his youthful skin. They stared down into the crippled heart of his body and asked Steve who was he now?

Steve is ashamed to know that his answer had been _absolutely no one_. 

Things, though, are different now. As he sits next to his best friend, his brother in every way but blood, Steve thinks of his team and friends. He has a life now that is made up of more than just the broken pieces of himself. It’s a life of freedom and privilege, but most importantly, it has Bucky. 

It’s a life out of place, but Steve finds that it is starting to adjust to the changing times and an uncertain future. That much at least is a step in the right direction, and it is better than nothing. 

So he sits on the balcony and tunes back into Bucky’s rant about Thor’s greedy appetite that had deprived him of pizza tonight. With a heavy thumb, Steve finally lets his finger drag against the thick page of his sketchbook as he overlooks the new New York skyline. He takes in a breath of the future and breathes out his past, forcing the air from his lungs as if it was an old ghost. 

This is his life in the new millennia. 

**Author's Note:**

> follow and fangirl with me on [tumblr](http://brooklynboystosupersoldiers.tumblr.com) because I love you all.
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own any characters, settings, plot lines, concepts, or terminology as created, used, and owned by Marvel Entertainment, LLC ®. This is a work of fanfiction.


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